Data centers route massive quantities of data. Currently, data centers may have a throughput of 5-10 terabytes per second, which is expected to increase in the future. Data centers contain huge numbers of racks of servers, racks of storage devices, and other racks often with top-of-rack (TOR) switches, which are interconnected via massive centralized packet switching resources. In data centers, electrical packet switches are used to route data. However, electrical packet switches have capacity limitations. To overcome those capacity issues, it may be desirable to use an optical packet switch in a data center.
Optical burst mode switches collect batches of packets from each source TOR which are destined for the same destination TOR across a switch and map them into multi-packet containers or bursts of data, which are transmitted across the switch. These containers may be many times the length of the longest packets. Burst mode switches work well when the per-destination packet rate is high, because the containers fill rapidly, even with a short container timeout. However, when a burst mode switch is used within a data center for switching between top of rack (TOR) switches, the traffic may be fragmented, and containers may be slow to fill. This may lead to a long fill period for some containers, with a long-timeout period, which may introduce delay and/or containers timing out, leading to partially filled or almost empty containers being transmitted, which may significantly reduce bandwidth efficiency and traffic data throughput.